Japan tsunami broke off icebergs in Antarctica

New space-based images show the same tsunami that
devastated Japan
also caused a series of giant icebergs to break off halfway around
the world in Antarctica.

On March 11, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the east
coast of Japan. Combined with the tsunami it unleashed, the event
led to the deaths of at least 15,000
people and inflicted damage costing upwards of $235 billion.

Yet the destructive wave didn't just crush Japanese shores. The
tsunami rippled through the Pacific Ocean, bent around New Zealand
and hit Antarctica after a little more than 18 hours, according to
an upcoming study in the Journal of Glaciology.

"This [is] the first observational evidence linking a tsunami to
ice-shelf calving," the authors wrote in the study, released by NASA
today.

The tsunami only reached a foot high after traveling 8,000 miles
to the Sulzberger Ice Shelf, but the European Space Agency
satellite Envisat was able to survey the damage through thick cloud
cover with its radar instruments.

In total, the tsunami liberated about 48 square miles of
icebergs from a region that had remained essentially unchanged for
close to half a century. The largest iceberg that calved off of the
Sulzberger Ice Shelf into the Ross Sea measured about 7 miles long
by 4 miles wide.